In the 1 March, 2010 article (“Japanese Business People through Indian Eyes”), I briefly mentioned the Pierre Cassé inventory and promised to return to the topic in a later article. Today, I will somewhat belatedly honour that promise.

The Cassé inventory is a wonderful tool for understanding your own approach to communication, teamwork, and business. It is less comprehensive than the Myers Briggs Type Indicator, but in a time-efficient manner, it provides some very interesting insights. The Cassé inventory has only twenty questions, which means it takes about five minutes to complete, and another ten or fifteen minutes to understand the result. Like the more famous MBTI, it centres on four main personality types.

The four personality orientations in the Cassé inventory are People, Idea, Action, and Process. First of all, for People types, the focus is stable relations with others. They tend not to make friends quickly, and they usually do not have many friends, but they are careful to maintain their close relationships. While they are not as extreme as Richard Gere’s favourite canine, Hachiko, loyalty is very important. As a result, People types tend to be a little conservative, and perhaps suspicious of change. When confronted with change, they think about what it will mean for them and others. A window of opportunity requires a meeting to consider what to do before acting.

Next, Idea types are stimulated by new opportunities, information, and people. They are curious about the world. They enjoy talking to others, and often have many friends (or at least acquaintances). They like dreaming up new ideas and systems. However, they can be guilty of not following through on their ideas or following their systems to the end. At the start of a new year, they may have many interesting resolutions, but by 11 January, those resolutions will likely have fallen by the wayside. A window of opportunity is exciting, but an Idea type may quickly find that there are other windows that it would be fun to look at.

The third type, the Action orientation, has a results focus. An Action type will want clear goals and targets. A fifty-fifty situation is a great chance for her to show her skill. She is unlikely to want to sit in meetings discussing business; she is more likely to want to go out and do business. Training programmes should have a clear outcome and benefit. Spending a whole day in a meeting can be torturous. Leaders should be decisive and they should be judged on their results. A window of opportunity is exciting and should be jumped through. Now.

Finally, Process types like to follow procedures. Those procedures were created by other people on the basis of their experience. In order to guarantee quality, we should follow procedures. Of course, kaizen is desirable, and we should always think about how to improve our existing procedures. However, we should not reinvent the wheel or start from scratch. Instead, we should build on the platform of what we already have. We should carefully trial ideas, and if we have proved that they are an improvement on the existing procedures, then we should adjust those procedures so that they are even better. That process is never-ending - in a sense, nothing is ever good enough, because there can always be some kaizen. If there is a window of opportunity, the window should be measured and examined. How have similar windows been dealt with in the past?

As you can imagine, there are different motivating factors for each of these four types, and we will think about that next time, as team leaders and project managers can use that information to help them achieve their goals.

With two big deadlines approaching, I should currently be up to my neck in a pilot project and literature review for my doctoral programme. At the moment, I am only up to my knees in it, which means that my New Year will be busy! Anyway, as I waded through the transcript of a very recent interview with a Japanese repatriate, I was struck once again by an excellent example of cultural attitudes to a) risk, and b) outsourcing. In the interview, the repatriate (who works for a pharmaceutical company) said, “When I worked overseas, I learned a lot about the differences between Japanese clinical organisations and Western ones. In a nutshell, Japanese clinical development means working in detail and in a meticulous way with a CRO [clinical research organization]. On the other hand, in the West, the main responsibility is to manage the CRO, not to work closely on operations. It is about vendor management.”

The repatriate went on to say, “In the Western organisation, we had a plan about how to use the clinical organisation, its roles and responsibility. The final deliverable from the CRO was the final report, so we reviewed the final report and data. We double-checked case reports. Then we picked up ten percent, fifteen percent, to see if there was any problem, and then if it was OK, well, it was OK. Yes. However, once we made our submission to a regulatory agency like the FDA [Food and Drug Administration], the regulatory agency checked as well and then if they pointed out an inconsistency in the data, that was our responsibility as the study sponsor. Western people, US people, they seem to feel that people will make mistakes, it’s a human thing, that’s the basic concept, so it’s OK, but in a Japanese clinical organisation, there’s almost always very careful monitoring of consistency between raw data and reports by the sponsor. It’s not just the CRO.”

This difference can certainly be explained in terms of the process orientation of many Japanese organisations, as opposed to the action orientation of many of their American counterparts. In addition, appetite for risk differs between countries due to cultural, historical, and structural issues. America is more entrepreneurial than Europe, for instance. Japanese people and their companies are famously reluctant to embrace risk. This is perhaps because the Japanese world view tends to be that there is enough uncertainty in the world anyway (which requires rinki ouhen) without actively encouraging it. In comparison with that Polychronic attitude, Monochronic people in more risk-friendly cultures such as the USA have more confidence in their contingency plans, and perhaps most crucially, in the idea of a second chance.

In an individualistic society that preaches forgiveness, that is not surprising. If you make a mistake, you apologise sincerely and then receive absolution. A second chance is harder to come by in a Polychronic culture in which people know one another’s business. Failure almost certainly seems more threatening collectivist cultures. It is no surprise that venture capital is more common in the United States than in Japan (http://www.economist.com/node/13216037) or Singapore or the UAE. There are complex pricing models to assess risk, such as the Capital Asset Pricing Model. In the USA, venture capitalists are often said to be sympathetic to entrepreneurs who have failed in past, as they have (presumably) learned from their past mistakes and so are more likely to be successful this time. On the other hand, the governments of Singapore and the UAE have famous investment funds - that is more collectivist than individualist.

Meanwhile, the High Context, Ameba (Polychronic) business approaches that are common in Japan often do not work well with outsourcing. One reason is that High Context people may have trouble specifying in an explicit manner what it is that they need from their business partner, whereas Low Context and Tetrispeople are more comfortable negotiating an explicit scope of work and then auditing the result rather than the process. Furthermore, Ameba tendencies will mean that people involve themselves in matters that are beyond the strict scope of their explicit responsibility, such as data consistency.

This reminds me of a story told to me by a manager in a Singaporean CRO. The parent company is North American. When an Ameba client asked her to go beyond the boundaries of the scope of work because of an unexpected development in the clinical trial, her first instinct was to comply. When she mentioned it to her North American, Tetris supervisor, however, she was told to stick to the scope of work, or to negotiate a new one and charge more money. She decided that it was in the best interests of her company to do as the client requested and ignore her supervisor. In her next performance review after the project had finished, her supervisor congratulated her and asked her how she had managed to both complete the project so smoothly and get such a high evaluation from the client. She told me that her response was necessarily very vague - she couldn’t talk to her North American supervisor about the things she had done outside the scope of work!

A number of years ago, an HR manager (Mr Stoneslope) working for one of our Japanese clients talked to his colleagues about the importance of learning English. He began by explaining that fifteen years ago, job applicants would proudly write “Proficient with Excel and Word” on their job resumés. Now, however, no employer would be impressed by this claim. In fact, they would likely assume that applicants for the majority of jobs could already use those software applications (as well PowerPoint). In the same way, he went on to say, a TOEIC score above 730 might just about carry some weight today, but in a few years, the ability to speak and understand English will be a basic skill. I agree with him. It is true that twenty years ago, Japanese were talking about internationalisation and English, and language schools were spreading their tentacles throughout the country. Now, though, we are in the age of globalisation, in which companies are being pushed to do more of their business overseas. English is the language of globalisation, and for those who say Chinese will overtake English, I have two words: “Chinese characters” (followed by the words, “… are too difficult for Chinese to become the world’s language”).

After listening to Mr Stoneslope, it also occurred to me that Japanese business people use Excel every day. Few of them can claim (or indeed, do claim in our seminars) to have mastered Excel. However, each of them uses it without too much concern or angst. They try things on the fly (trial and error), they ask others for tips, and they get what they need from the tool. They should think of English in the same way: as a business tool that can be used even if it is not completely mastered. Trial and error and asking others for tips are valid approaches for using English in business. Japanese should start to think in terms of Excel English, then.

Connected to this, we have used for many years the Japanese word “hirakinaoru” in our seminars at INTEC. In particular, we use it to suggest (beg?) that Japanese business people quickly admit when they don’t understand something in English. After all, as non-native speakers, they cannot expect to understand 100% of what they hear or read. When they don’t understand, we ask them to say so, and when they are speaking to someone in English, to do that within one second. This is connected to the idea of speaker responsibility, a topic we have looked at in previous articles. That same word, “hirakinaoru,” was used by the Japanese football player Kumagai, Saki in an interview immediately following Japan’s victory over the USA in the Women’s World Cup earlier this year. Ms Kumagai took Japan’s final penalty in the nail-biting penalty shoot-out. When asked by a television interviewer whether she had been nervous, she said that she had. She then said she decided something along the lines of, “What the heck, let’s give it a go.” The Japanese word she used was “hirakinaoru.”

Fans of Nadeshiko Japan, the victorious women’s football team, should take note. They should have the very same attitude when they have to use English. The important thing is to have a go, to try rather than to plan for perfection. After all, in communication, the other person (whether she is a reader or a listener) can ask for clarification or suggest vocabulary and ideas.

Whether it is Excel English or Hirakinaoru English, Japanese people need to change the way they approach communication in that language. Anyone who has worked with global teams will know that there are non-native speakers of English out there who use the language as a tool for their work, but whose pronunciation or grammar or vocabulary is less than perfect. Good for them.

In June, my colleague Robert Hilke and I went to Chicago to make a presentation at the 2011 Drug Information Association conference. We had the chance to meet many people in the industry and to discuss ideas about how diversity impacts on their business. We were also able to see other presentations. The highlight for me was a presentation given by the American statistician and author Tad Waddington.

Tad (if I may presume to call him that) made a fascinating speech about the return on investment on training. What he found is that training generates a spectacular degree of value for companies (which, as you can imagine, put a spectacular smile on my face).

Tad works at Accenture in the USA. In an attempt to quantify the value of training to organisations such as his own, he analysed data from the many thousands of people who have worked for Accenture over the past decade. One key part of his analysis was to look at the number of training hours taken by each employee and the dollar amount she (or he) had billed clients. The rationale for using dollars billed as a metric was that it represented a clear and quantifiable benefit for Accenture. Of course, the longer someone works for Accenture, the more senior she is likely to become, which means that each billable hour will be more expensive. Also, the longer she works for Accenture, the more training she is likely to have. Because of this, Tad performed some statistical magic and controlled for length of service. In other words, he took out the impact of length of service in his analysis so that he could focus on the relationship between amount of training and the amount billed to clients.

Tad’s numerical wizardry revealed that the return on investment for Accenture in terms of billing was over 500% for that period. In other words, for every dollar spent on training, the organisation harvested a reward of more than five dollars. The benefits did not stop with increased income, though. The vaunted consulting firm McKinsey made the expression “war for talent” famous when it talked about how companies compete for the best employees. To better understand Accenture’s position in that war, Tad went on to survey some of the most promising students at the USA’s most prestigious universities, and found that Accenture’s reputation for excellent employee training was very attractive for them. Indeed, Tad found that those students would be willing to work for Accenture even if their salary were below market value. The fact that the company is able to recruit top talent is partly attributable to its investment in training, then, and this provides more evidence of the positive ROI for training.

Recruitment is not the only benefit of training, however. Retention is another key area for any company. If firms cannot keep their best people, then not only is there an opportunity cost when those employees leave (since they no longer contribute their talents to those organisations), but there is also a cost involved in finding and training new people. Tad found that training played a role in the retention of good people.

At the end of his compelling presentation, Tad suggested that while people cannot, and should not, be in training all the time, companies ought to find a better balance between the training room and the workplace. In answering questions from the floor, he said that training opens neural pathways, and that even training that may not appear immediately useful may well turn out to be valuable.

What is the return on investment for INTEC’s clients who spend money on Intercultural Business Communication training? While I don’t have specific numbers at my fingertips to answer that question, we certainly have plenty of qualitative evidence from seminar participants and HR managers of the positive impact of that type of training. Perhaps we should ask Tad for his help in putting a number on that impact.

You will remember from last month that the GLOBE (“Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness”) researchers found some aspects of leadership are effective in any culture, while others are specific to particular cultures. For instance, being trustworthy and inspiring confidence in others are universally effective, being irritable and egocentric are universally undesirable, and being individualistic and taking risks depend on the culture. In this month’s article, we will look at some differences between leadership in Brazil, France, Egypt, and China.

In their 2006 paper (“Cross Cultural Lessons in Leadership from Project GLOBE,” Academy of Management Perspectives), Javidan, Dorfman, Sully de Luque, and House describe ideal leadership qualities in those four countries. First of all, the researchers suggest that in Brazil, it is vital to seek out senior people in an organisation so as to build strong personal relationships. Furthermore, a leader should spend time with her team members and their families. She will likely find that it takes time to elicit input from team members about projects and operations, but she should do this nonetheless, so that when she makes (and clearly communicates) her decision, her team feels included. Short-term milestones are important, as is the avoidance of unnecessary risk-taking. The leader should make sure that she clarifies rules and procedures for each project on an ad hoc basis. Finally, rewards need to have a strong team component, as well as some limited reflection of individual effort.

Unlike in Brazil, a leader in France is typically expected to focus on business and her organisation, rather than on building strong personal relationships. However, just as in Brazil, sweeping corporate visions and long time frames are ineffective. A leader should clarify the benefit to each team member of working hard on a project (what the researchers call “transactional leadership”). Strategy and action plans should be carefully planned and communicated to each team member. In Egypt, meanwhile, leaders are expected to respect group harmony and avoid group conflict when making decisions. Indeed, they should create strong links with specific groups - kinship and loyalty are vital parts of the Egyptian value system. At the same time, too, they should cultivate the aura of an all-seeing and all-knowing boss who (unlike in Brazil and France) communicates a grand vision. People who break the agreed rules should be punished in order to preserve order within the group. A leader will take a close interest in the personal well being of his team members, and rewards should be team-based. Rewards may also include perquisites that benefit employees’ families, such as tuition subsidies and home appliance bonuses. However, unlike in Brazil, a leader should not include family members in team activities.

Finally, in China, the GLOBE researchers note that like Americans, Chinese prefer leaders who demand and reward high levels of individual achievement. As in Egypt, a leader should work to strengthen personal ties within a group, and he should be seen to look after his team members. Chinese leaders are expected to make decisions, and to both protect and further the interests of his subordinates. When deciding work schedules, for example, a leader should show consideration for his team members and their family commitments. Finally, a leader should use metaphors and stories to communicate a grand vision of the future.

The GLOBE research, then, demonstrates some important differences between what is expected of leaders in different cultures. This suggests that when expatriates are chosen to go overseas, they should either be matched with cultures that suit their individual styles, or they should be trained to change their style based on their surroundings. Of course, not every organisation or employee in any given country will hold the same values and react in the same way, but the GLOBE research gives managers a starting place. It is then up to them to objectively understand, and then get the best from, their new team members.

The most famous research about culture and its impact on business is almost certainly Geert Hofstede’s country analysis based on a survey of IBM employees around the world. Hofstede initially posited four cultural dimensions: uncertainty avoidance, masculinity and femininity, individualism and collectivism, and power distance. Of these four, we use PDI (“Power Distance Index”) at INTEC as evidence of different approaches to decision-making and comfort with power gaps. Hofstede later added short-term/long-term orientation as a fifth dimension based on his work with Michael Harris Bond. Recently, the most noteworthy study is Project GLOBE (for instance, see House, Hanges, Javidan, Dorfman, and Gupta’s 2004 book, “Leadership, culture and organizations: The GLOBE study of 62 societies”).

The “GLOBE” of Project GLOBE stands for “Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness” (URL). This study looks at the attributes that make a leader successful in one culture (for instance, France) and then examines whether those same attributes would be an asset or a liability in other cultures (such as Brazil or China). The authors use nine dimensions to describe cultures: performance orientation (Hong Kong is high on this scale and Russia low), assertiveness (Austria is high and New Zealand is low), future orientation (Switzerland is high and Argentina low), humane orientation (Malaysia is high on this scale and France is low), societal collectivism (Sweden is high, while Brazil is low), in-group collectivism (Turkey is high and the UK is low), gender egalitarianism (Portugal is high and South Korea is low), power distance (Thailand is high and Australia is low), and uncertainty avoidance (Singapore is high and Greece is low).

The GLOBE data come from around 17,000 managers in 62 regions and countries. Asking managers about leadership raises a warning flag for Hofstede, who comments as follows in a November, 2006 Journal of International Business Studies article entitled “What Did GLOBE Really Measure?”: “Measuring leadership from survey answers by leaders is, in my eyes, a debatable approach. If you want to find out about the quality of a product, do you ask the producer or the consumers?” Concerns about methodology aside, in their analysis, the GLOBE research team identifies various cultural clusters, including “Latin Europe” (e.g., France and Italy) and “Confucian Asia” (including China, Singapore, and Japan). On the nine dimensions above, the relative order (high to low) for China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan is shown below.

1. (Individual) performance orientation: Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, China, Japan
2. Assertiveness: Hong Kong, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, China, Japan
3. Future orientation: Singapore, Japan, Hong Kong, South Korea, Taiwan, China
4. Humane orientation: China, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea, Singapore
5. Societal collectivism: South Korea, Japan, Singapore, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong
6. In-group collectivism: China, Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Japan
7. Gender egalitarianism: Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, Taiwan, China, South Korea
8. Power distance: South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, China, Singapore, Hong Kong
9. Uncertainty avoidance: Singapore, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea

Based on these findings, Japan shows lower levels of in-group collectivism than other countries in the cluster, which means that China, Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, and Hong Kong have stronger tendencies than Japan towards identifying with their in-group and excluding people in out-groups. This is particularly true with regards to their families.

Perhaps one reason for this is that Japanese tend to spend a lot of time at work, and are rotated through different sections and departments in their organisations. Loyalty is more to the company than to a specific group of people, then. Nonetheless, as a Briton, I was initially surprised (and to be honest, at times I still am) by how strong in-group collectivism is in Japan - sure enough, a glance at the GLOBE data shows that Japan is higher on this scale than the UK. Meanwhile, Japan is also lowest of the six countries on the assertiveness scale, which is not surprising, as Japanese tend to strenuously avoid confrontation. Finally, Japan is lowest on the performance orientation; certainly, bonuses in Japan usually reflect company performance or union-management obligations far more than individual results.

The GLOBE team found that some aspects of leadership are effective in any culture, while some are specific to particular cultures. They identified “22 attributes that were universally deemed to be desirable” (from the February, 2006 article “In the Eye of the Beholder” in the Academy of Management Perspectives journal, by Javidan, Dorfman, Sully de Luque, and House): being trustworthy and inspiring confidence in others are two of these. Eight attributes are said to be universally undesirable, such as being irritable and egocentric, while some other attributes depend on the culture, for example, being individualistic and taking risks.

We will look at these differences in next month’s article. For now, though, please think about what you expect from leaders. How much of that is based on your cultural preferences and how much on your (more purely) personal preferences?

In the last article, we saw that the idea of Organizational Citizenship Behavior captures some of the essence of an Amoeba approach to work. Both are discretionary, for example, as an employee can chose whether or not to go the extra mile or yard beyond the boundaries of her agreed job. Neither is formally recognised by the performance management system of the organisation. By definition, OCB contributes to the effective functioning of the organisation; this is usually the case with Amoeba behaviour, too.

The two concepts are not an exact match, however. OCB assumes that each person’s role has been explicitly agreed in advance, and also that there is a formal performance management system that focusses on assessing how well someone fulfills her role. This is not necessarily the case in an Amoeba organisation. First of all, roles are left much vaguer, and secondly, performance management tends to be informal - a work group will clearly know which of its members are the best (and worst) performers, but the HR Department’s formal records will not capture that same information (and certainly not at the same level of granularity).

However, in practice, it can be hard to distinguish between the two. Let’s look at a specific case study taken from INTEC Japan. Every other month, the Intercultural Communication and Skills Training team gets together in the office for an informal study meeting. No one is paid for her time, and yet if they are in Japan, all nine members (one New Zealander, one Chinese, two Canadians, two Britons, and three US Americans) make themselves available for a whole day to talk face-to-face in a focussed way about what we do and why we do it. The Chair each time is different. We also take it in turns to choose a book or set of articles about management and culture to discuss in the morning session - everyone comes to the meeting having invested significant time in reading the material. In the afternoon, we talk about other topics, one of which is typically yokoten suggestions.

If I may digress for a moment, yokoten is an interesting word. Originally, of course, it comes from the Toyota Production System - techniques, kaizen incremental innovations, and information are shared across the organisation once they have been piloted and tested. As this definition of yokoten from the Internet shows, the term is often translated into English as “best practice,” but done properly, yokoten should also involve the sharing of worst practice: “We did X, and it was a disaster, so don’t do it yourself” or, “We did A, B, and C in one instance, and it was great, but when we tried it in a different environment, it had some unexpected side effects.”

Back to the main topic: by coming to bi-monthly meetings, are the INTEC team members displaying an OCB or Amoeba orientation? In the sense that they are paid for their interactions with clients in consulting projects or training rooms, then they are clearly going beyond the boundaries of their roles, which could be either or both. However, there are no formal job descriptions at INTEC, and performance management relies on a combination of qualitative and quantitative data from training room questionnaires, qualitative feedback from HR contacts, and comments from INTEC peers, rather than being based on periodic performance review sessions with a (more senior) manager and numbers in a Personnel Department file. In that sense, the team members’ behaviour is Amoeba.

Finally, though, the distinction is not important. What is more important is that if you are having trouble explaining Amoeba attitudes to Tetris business partners, introducing the idea of Organizational Citizenship Behavior may be a way of opening their minds. It also functions as a good tongue-twister (just try saying it three times in a row).

This will come as no surprise to regular readers of this column (to whom, thank you!): I have to admit to having something of a fascination with Monochronic and Polychronic approaches to work, responsibility, and performance management. As you may recall, at INTEC we term these Tetris and Amoeba styles. Please imagine, then, how my eyes lit up when I came across the grandiose term, “Organizational Citizenship Behavior” . “OCB” (which in this shortened form sounds like an unfortunate medical condition) is defined as the willingness of someone to go beyond the formal boundaries of her job. European researchers Euwema, Wendt, and Van Emmerik characterise OCB in a 2007 paper (“Leadership Styles and Group Organizational Citizenship Behavior across Cultures”) as “individual behavior, not directly or explicitly recognized by the formal reward system, which promotes the effective functioning of the organization.” Amoeba, anyone?!

It turns out that there has been a lot of research on OCB in the past few decades. (A Google search this morning turned up 986,000 links within 0.18 seconds.) Kirkman, Chen, Farh, Chen, and Lowe, for instance, published a paper (“Individual Power Distance Orientation and Follower Reactions to Transformational Leaders: a Cross-level, Cross-cultural Examination”) in 2009 in the Academy of Management Journal that reported the relationship between Power Distance and “transformational leadership”. Using survey respondents from China and the USA, they found that people who have lower Power Distance orientations are likely to respond more positively to transformational leadership because it appeals to their idea of what is fair (“procedural justice”) in relation to making decisions. In other words, if you are more comfortable with a flat approach to management and decision making, rather than a top-down style, then you will respond better to confident, charismatic leaders who inspire and challenge you to make changes in your organisation (and who then praise you when you make progress towards your goals).

Kirkman and the team also found a very small, negative relationship between Power Distance orientation and Organizational Citizenship Behavior, which is interesting - are people who are more top-down in their orientation more likely to behave in an Amoeba way at work? Regardless, the idea of Organizational Citizenship Behavior itself is very interesting, as it seems to capture some of the essence of an Amoeba approach to work. Therefore, I will look at this idea in more detail next month.

Before finishing, though, two final comments: firstly, the completion rate for Kirkman’s survey was 82% in the USA, and 100% in China. Assuming a survey request from renowned researchers would trigger compliance in people who are top-down, this would suggest that the Chinese respondents were (on average) more top-down than their American counterparts. That is certainly consistent with Hofstede’s data). Secondly, Kirkman and his four colleagues find that it is important to look at each individual’s score to predict how he will behave, rather than relying on generalisations: “it is probable that the roles of country-level cultural differences in models of leader-follower interface are possibly less direct than the roles of individual-level cultural orientations.” This takes us back to the topic of last month’s article. Nonetheless, the fact that more Chinese than Americans (in percentage terms) completed the survey suggests that there really are national tendencies. Cultural conditioning, then, is still a reasonable predictor of behaviour, but when we deal with individuals, we cannot forget that we need to understand their specific tendencies.

The title of this month’s article is a direct quotation from one of my colleagues, Robert Hilke. In every Intercultural Communication and Business seminar that he teaches, he makes sure to emphasise the point that there are national tendencies (http://www.intecjapan.com/gaz/2008/03/more_on_objectivity_and_stereo.html), which can be represented on different scales, and at the same time, there are also individual differences, with each point on each scale being represented to a greater or lesser extent by people in each culture.

Similarly, Kirkman, Chen, Farh, Chen, and Lowe in an August 2009 Academy of Management Journal paper (“Individual Power Distance Orientation and Follower Reactions to Transformational Leaders: a Cross-Level, Cross-Cultural Examination”) have advice for managers dealing with subordinates from other cultures: “When in Rome, get to know Romans as individuals.” They use this advice to make the point that although there are differences between tendencies in cultures, there are also differences between the individuals within those cultures. In their study, for instance, they show that Chinese tend to be higher on Hofstede’s Power Distance scale than Americans. Nonetheless, their study shows that individual level differences have a more significant impact than national level differences on how people react specifically to transformational leadership. In other words, they are making a similar point to Robert’s: individual differences are (of course) important.

“Transformational leadership” as a concept is attributed to J. M. Burns and Bernard M. Bass. Transformational leaders have charisma. They share a compelling vision with followers and challenge them intellectually to make changes for the better. In a word, they are inspirational. Despite this, Kirkman et al find that “employees with higher levels of power distance orientation are less likely to be influenced by transformational leadership behaviors alone and may instead need to be led via different or additional leadership styles” (page 757).

To help managers assess and understand which styles to use with whom, Kirkman and his fellow authors suggest that it would be a good idea to assess employees’ power distance orientation when hiring, training, and evaluating them. This mirrors one of the themes from INTEC’s training seminars, namely that if companies want to improve the practice and results of management, then they should do more to select and guide their employees using ‘maps’ of intercultural communication and management. As noted above, “transformational leaders need to take into account not only the particular country in which they operate, but also the cultural value orientations of the specific individuals they lead” (Kirkman et al, page 746).

In their research, Kirkman, Chen, Farh, Chen, and Lowe also discuss the ideas of procedural justice, or perceptions about the fairness of decision-making, and organizational citizenship behavior, that is willingness to go beyond the boundaries of their jobs. They find that people who have lower power distance orientations are likely to respond more positively to transformational leadership because it appeals to their idea of what is fair (i.e., procedural justice) in relation to making decisions. If you are more comfortable with a flat, rather than top-down approach, then you will respond better to charismatic leaders who inspire and challenge you to make changes. Kirkman and the team also found a very small, negative relationship between power distance orientation and organizational citizenship behavior, which is interesting - are people who are more top-down in their orientation more likely to go the extra mile at work? It seems unlikely to me. Regardless, the idea of organizational citizenship behavior itself is very interesting, as it seems to capture some of the essence of an Ameba approach to work. Therefore, I will look at this idea in more detail next month.

Last month, we looked at the idea of “faultlines” and saw that pure diversity is likely to be less disruptive to a team or organisation than diversity that results in cliques (i.e., faultlines). According to researchers Li and Hambrick in their Academy of Management Journal 2005 paper, “Factional Groups: A New Vantage on Demographic Faultlines, Conflict, and Disintegration in Work Teams,” the latter leads to task and emotional conflict, which then contributes to poor performance.

Li and Hambrick looked at the management groups of 71 joint ventures between Chinese and Western companies in China. They identified companies with Chinese and Western sub-groups within the management teams, and showed that faultlines between those factions created conflict. Furthermore, they showed that the conflict, and in particular, the emotional (rather than task) conflict, led to sub-standard performance for the organisations. "What this means in practice is that managers of diverse teams should pay attention to “annoyance, mistrust, and animosity” (i.e., emotional conflict) and not worry too much about disagreements over what gets done and how (i.e., task conflict). They should certainly think about how to deal with faultlines before cliques develop and serious emotional conflict breaks out.

Admittedly, the research only looks at joint ventures in China. What is more, the companies that Li and Hambrick surveyed were all joint ventures between Chinese and American or European companies. Therefore, it would be easy to attack the findings and suggest that they should not be applied more generally to other national and corporate contexts. Furthermore, the authors admit that the management groups that they chose “faced significant needs to coordinate their activities,” which suggests that the impact of faultlines might have been greater than for “management groups in organizations that consist of easily divisible, autonomous subunits.” Nonetheless, coordination between different functional and national groups is increasingly important as development processes, supply chains, and management groups become more diverse and complex. In addition, many people who have worked in global or globalising companies have admitted to INTEC facilitators in seminars and consulting projects that they face similar issues to those described by Li and Hambrick.

The research, then, is valuable and surprising. It shows how faultlines are bigger when diversity is moderate, rather than when there is abundant diversity. When you stop and think about it, this idea is counterintuitive. Li and Hambrick use a quantitative approach, confirming with hard data what seems to be an obvious and critical point: namely that demographic factors, including national and corporate culture, can have a significant impact on the way that people communicate and work together in teams. What is more, their work demonstrates that although both emotional and task conflict result from factional faultlines (and are, in fact, positively correlated), it is emotional conflict that has a significantly negative impact on behavioral integration; this leads in turn to poor team performance.

In conclusion, the research provides a useful context for business managers questioning how to benefit from diversity in their teams by minimising drawbacks. After all, as the authors point out, “collaborative efforts are played out in conference rooms, hallway conversations, e-mail exchanges, and phone calls in which small groups of people from two sides are trying to hammer out joint products.”

As an interesting illustration and extension of the faultline idea, we have seen many companies based outside Japan (e.g., Indian, European, and North American) withdraw non-Japanese from the country in the wake of the 11 March earthquake and tsunami. At INTEC, we have even consulted with foreign-capital companies on this issue. From a risk management point of view, the financial implications of employees and their families dying overseas are frightening for those organisations, as they would have to pay huge amounts of compensation. On the other hand, the cost of chartering a plane to fly those employees and their families home is small change in comparison. And yet, the cost of being seen to abandon colleagues, subordinates, suppliers, and customers at such a time are going to be very high, and in some cases, the trust may never be regained. We know of at least one senior management team with a huge faultline between the Japanese members (who stayed in Japan) and their non-Japanese colleagues (who left the country). They will need a lot of help dealing with the aftermath.